Folklore as an Historical Science

by George Laurence Gomme

To answer these questions I can only deal with the Semang evidence as it appears in researches of great authority and weight, and there is undoubtedly in all the evidence produced by Messrs. Skeat and Blagden, and the authorities they use, nothing whatever to suggest that Semang totemism once possessed above it an elaborate social organisation of the usual totemic type. There is indeed, the myth which points to a two-class exogamous division for marital purposes,[379] but there is more than myth for the unrestricted intercourse of the sexes both before and after marital rights.[380] In every other direction we get simple groups fashioned on no larger basis than nomadic roaming and journeying to fresh food grounds. On the other hand, there is much to suggest that the Arunta have a dual system of organisation; one, in which the primitive types are still surviving, the second, a more advanced type which covers but does not crush out the first. If this is so, it is clear that the parallel between Semang and Arunta totemism is considerably closer than at first appears.

It will be necessary, therefore, to deal with the two principal signs of alleged Arunta progress, male descent and the exogamous classes. I see no evidence whatever of male descent; male ascendancy, a very different thing, appears, but there cannot strictly be male descent where fatherhood is unrecognised. And here I would interpose the remark that the use of the term descent, male descent and female descent, in these studies is far too indiscriminate.[381] Descent means succession by blood kinship by acknowledged sons or daughters, and this is exactly what does not always occur. Sonship and daughtership in our sense of the term are not always known to savagery. They were not known to the Arunta males, for fatherhood was not recognised by them and motherhood was not definitely used in the social sense. All that the Arunta can be said to have developed is a mother-right society with male ascendancy in the group.[382] Group sons succeeded to group fathers, but individual descent from father to son there is not.

There remain the exogamous classes. In the first place, it is necessary to get rid of a difficulty raised by Mr. Lang. "In no tribe with female descent can a district have its local totem as among the Arunta.... This can only occur under male reckoning of descent."[383] But surely so acute an observer as Mr. Lang would see that with female descent right through, as it exists among the Khasia and Kocch people of Assam, local totem centres are just as possible as with male descent. Mr. Lang is conscious of some discrepancy here, for a little later on he repeats the statement that local totem centres "can only occur and exist under male reckoning of descent," but adds the significant qualification "in cases where the husbands do not go to the wives' region of abode."[384] This is the whole point. Where husbands do go to the wives' region of abode, as they do among the Khasis and the Kocch, female descent would allow of the formation of local totem centres. This is not far from the position of the Arunta. They are mother-right societies. The mother secures the totem name. The father, de facto, is not father according to the ideas of the Arunta people, is at best only one of a group of possible fathers according to the practices of the Arunta people. Therefore, the local totem centre is formed out of a system which may be called a mother-right system for the purpose of scientific description, but which is not even a mother-right system to the natives, because motherhood is not the foundation of the local group.

Secondly, we have the important fact, which Mr. Lang has duly noted, though he does not apparently see its significance in the argument as to origins, that the class system "arose in a given centre and was propagated by emigrants and was borrowed by distant tribes."[385] Messrs. Spencer and Gillen distinctly affirm that the "division into eight has been adopted (or rather the names for the four new divisions have been) in recent times by the Arunta tribe from the Ilpirra tribe which adjoins the former on the north, and the use of them is at the present time spreading southwards."[386] This view is supported by the widespread organisation of eaglehawk and crow, and by the general homogeneity of Australian social forms. It is clear, therefore, that room is made for the external organisation of the class system and the consequent production of the dual characteristics of the Arunta—the joint product of the fossilisation of mother-right society at the end of the migration movement, and the superimposing upon this fossilisation, with its tendency towards the class system, of the fully organised class system. The two systems are not now fully welded in the Arunta group. Whatever view is taken of these, whether they be considered advanced or primal, the undoubted dualism has to be accounted for, and the best way of accounting for this dualism is, I submit, that of differential evolution. Further study of Messrs. Spencer and Gillen's work, together with the criticisms of various scholars, Mr. Lang, Mr. Hartland, Mr. Frazer, Mr. Thomas, and others, convinces me that the extreme artificiality of the class system is due partly to a want of understanding of the entire facts, and partly to the ad hoc adoption by the natives themselves of new plans to meet difficulties which must arise out of a too close adhesion to their rules. Mr. Lang has allowed me to see a manuscript note of his, in which he points out that the inevitable result of the one totem to the one totem rule of marital relationship,—that is, totem A always intermarrying with totem B, males and females from both totems, and with no others,—is the consanguineous relationship of all the members of the two totems. The rule for non-consanguineous marriage has therefore broken down, and when it breaks down the Australian introduces a new rule which satisfies immediate necessities. When this in turn breaks down a further new rule is made, and this is the way I think the differing rules resulted. They represent, therefore, not varying degrees of culture progress, but only varying degrees of artificial social changes, and they spring from the oldest conditions of all where there is no class system at all.[387] Arunta society is not a "sport" under this view, but a product—a product to be accounted for and explained by anthropological rules, derived not only from Australian society but from the general facts of human society which have remained for observation by the science of to-day. The parallel between Semang and Arunta, therefore, helps us in two ways. It enables us to go back to Semang totemism as an example of primitive kinless society, and forward to Arunta totemism as an example of early development therefrom. We have, in point of fact, discovered the datum line of totemism. Upon this may be constructed the various examples according to their degrees of development, and we may thus see in detail the commencing elements of totemism as well as the means by which we may proceed from the commencing elements to the more advanced elements, and finally to the last stages of totemic society where blood kinship is fully recognised and used, where, in fact, totemic tribes as distinct from totemic peoples take their place in the world's history.

IV

I do not propose in this chapter to proceed further with this inquiry. It will not advance my object, nor is it absolutely necessary. Totemism in the full has been described adequately by Mr. Frazer in his valuable abstract of the evidence supplied from all parts of the world, and there is not much in dispute among the authorities when once the stage of origin is passed. There is danger, however, at the other extreme, namely, the attempt to discover totemism in impossible places in civilisation. Mr. Morgan has shown us totemic society in its highest form of development, untouched by other influences of sufficient consequence to divert its natural evolution. This, I think, is the merit of Mr. Morgan's great work, and not his attempt, his futile attempt as I think, to apply the principles of totemic society to the elucidation of societies that have long passed the stage of totemism. In particular, the great European civilisations are not totemic, nor are they to be seen passing from totemism. It is true that Mr. Lang, Mr. Grant Allen, and others have attempted to trace in certain features of Greek ritual and belief, and in certain tribal formations discoverable in Anglo-Saxon Britain, the relics of a living totemism in the civilised races of Europe;[388] but I do not believe either of these scholars would have endorsed his early conclusions in later studies. Mr. Grant Allen did not, so far as I know, repeat this theory after its first publication, and Mr. Lang has given many signs of being willing to withdraw it. The fact is, there is no necessity to think of Greek or English totem society because in Greece and England there are traces of totem beliefs. We may disengage them from their national position and put them back to the position they occupied before the coming of Greek or Englishman into the countries they have made their own.

In that position there may well have been totemic peoples in Britain of the type we have been considering from Australia. I have already indicated that totemic survivals in folklore have been the subject of a special study of my own which still in the main stands good, and for which I have collected very many additional illustrations and proofs. I discovered that folklore contained some remarkably perfect examples of totemic belief and custom, and also a considerable array of scattered belief and custom connected with animals and plants which, unclassified, seemed to lead to no definite stage of culture history, yet when classified, undoubtedly led to totemism. The result was somewhat remarkable. At many points there are direct parallels to savage totemism, and the whole associated group of customs received adequate explanation only on the theory that it represented the detritus of a once existing totemic system of belief.

The present study enables me to take the parallel to primitive totemism much closer. One of the perfect examples was of a local character. This was found in Ossory. Giraldus Cambrensis tells an extraordinary legend to the following effect: "A priest benighted in a wood on the borders of Meath was confronted by a wolf, who after some preliminary explanations gave this account of himself: There are two of us, a man and a woman, natives of Ossory, who through the curse of one Natalis, saint and abbot, are compelled every seven years to put off the human form and depart from the dwellings of men. Quitting entirely the human form, we assume that of wolves. At the end of the seven years, if they chance to survive, two others being substituted in their places, they return to their country and their former shape."[389] Here is a saintly legend introduced to explain the current tradition of the men of Ossory, that they periodically turned into wolves. Fynes Moryson, in 1603, ridiculed the beliefs of "some Irish who will be believed as men of credit," that men in Ossory were "yearly turned into wolves."[390] But an ancient Irish MS. puts the matter much more clearly in the statement that the "descendants of the wolf are in Ossory,"[391] while the evidence of Spenser and Camden explains the popular beliefs upon even more exact lines. Spenser says "that some of the Irish doe use to make the wolf their gossip;"[392] and Camden adds that they term them "Chari Christi, praying for them and wishing them well, and having contracted this intimacy, professed to have no fear from their four-footed allies." Fynes Moryson expressly mentions the popular dislike to killing wolves, and they were not extirpated until the eighteenth century.[393] Aubrey adds that "in Ireland they value the fang-tooth of an wolfe, which they set in silver and gold as we doe ye Coralls;"[394] and Camden notes the similar use of a bit of wolf's skin.[395]

In the local superstitions of Ossory, therefore, we have several of the cardinal features of savage totemism, the descent from the totem-animal, the ascription to the totem of a sacred character, the belief in its protection, and a taboo against killing it. I will venture to suggest, however, that to these important features there is to be added a parallel in survival to the Semang and Arunta features where the local circumstances of birth are the determining forces which supply the totem name, for the relationship of "gossip," "god-sib," is clearly of the same character as that of the soul-tree of the Semang and the alcheringa of the Australian.[396] The condition of survival has altered the detail of the parallel, but the parallel is on the same plane.

The wolf as gossip to the men of Ossory leads us on to inquire whether any other animal had such close connections with human beings. In Erris, a part of Connaught, "the people consider that foxes perfectly understand human language, that they can be propitiated by kindness, and even moved by flattery. They not only make mittens for Reynard's feet to keep him warm in winter, and deposit these articles carefully near their holes, but they make them sponsors for their children, supposing that under the close and long-established relationship of Gossipred they will be induced to befriend them."[397] Thus it appears that the selfsame conception which the men of Ossory had in the thirteenth century for the wolf, the men of Erris had for the fox in the nineteenth century. No explanation from the dry details of the natural history of these animals is sufficient to account for this curious parallel, and we must turn to ancient beliefs for the explanation.